Saturday, May 23, 2015

The Body-Without-Organs as a Response in Post-Earthquake Nepal

In post-earthquake Nepal, people have many ideas on how to deal with unbearable trauma, but mostly these ideas arise out of desperation and the need for a quick solution. And then there is now also more anger towards that nature from where the earthquake arose, an anger which could be problematic as it leads to more deforestation, poaching and pollution in Nepal...that is why the progressive development of Deleuze and Guattari's body-without-organs (BwO) is the most adequate response to the trauma of the earthquake: the BwO entails the removal of skin so as not to feel the sensations of the quakes, the removal of eyes so that the quakes are not visible...the losing of one's physical bodily organs linking one's self to the quake. The BwO could be a direct result of the trauma (“I lost sight in my eye-organ because of seeing too much of the earthquake”), an actual medical operation to remove the eye/skin, or it could be an intense imagined state, in any case where the skin and other organs that sense and respond to the earthquake cease to be a part of the functioning body, becoming instead a non-functioning mediation between nature and the BwO.

As everyone is running around in panic during the earthquake, the BwO remains steady and still, doing productive activities. As a careful tactician, the BwO channels all its productive energy/labor away from the organ which it sees as problematic: the eyes may be inactive/removed, for instance, but the ears can be more active than before. In this way, a clutter of organs is reduced to a few highly productive ones, and production does not cease even during and after an earthquake. In a world used to production from all available bodily organs, the production from a select few organs yields novel objects not encountered before, and in this regard the BwO's productivity works as a rebellion against full-bodied capitalist industrial production.

When one sheds one's skin, there is no need to enact a kind of violent change on nature to deal with the trauma of the earthquake; there is no angry response turned towards nature, because the earthquake is not felt, at least not in its full severity. On the other hand, there is no real change to the BwO either, because the skin is only a mediator between the BwO and nature; the skin does not belong to BwO or to nature. And hence the skin can be “shed” to curb the response of the conscious mind and body to the earthquake. The earthquake occurs and there is harm enacted upon the BwO, but, it is not registered, and thus the BwO continues to become productive, it continues to live with the earthquake but without reliance for its productivity on such whims of nature.

The BwO does not feel the sensations of harm to the body so as not to feel self-centered and self-defensive when it comes to the earthquake. Due to this selflessness, the BwO could have a positive social/altruistic function, very helpful in the post-earthquake situation. Also, for the BwO there is no sentimental attachment to the removed organs of the body, which is indeed a big feat given the protective mentality with which a person is characterized when it comes to the body's protection.

When the BwO becomes productive during an earthquake, it becomes admired for its bravery and for its work-ethic, and so it becomes a historical/heroic object, its “body-ness” not realized by those who celebrate it. But the BwO is still a living body, and death may occur to such a body at any time, for the BwO's survivalist tendency is weakened by the loss of organs. Yet there is still definitely a kind of contentment to the body's death, because nature has not been harmed, the earth remains safe for more years to come. 

Monday, May 18, 2015

Nepal's “Culture Shock” With Post-Earthquake Aircraft

It is post-earthquake Nepal, and unfamiliar planes have been flying overhead constantly...These aircraft are a necessity now, true, but they happen to be objects without proper cultural context and cultural reference points in Nepali society. And these aircraft are part of a wider problem: that the Nepali cultural production to deal with this crisis will be interrupted by drastically foreign objects/aid, particularly those signs of foreignness without a well-established significance and meaning in our society. A cultural imperialism is taking place in Nepal: the very loud sound of the unfamiliar aircraft reminds one of the stories heard of loud and disturbing music played to natives or prisoners in western wars as a way of muting and shocking those populations into instant defeat. But as this particular imperialism has the face of benevolent foreign aid, there will not even be many critical stories/legends about it. When there is no reference point to a foreign object, there is not even a properly 'visible' adversary one can identify, rather, something defeats one without even registering as an “enemy” or “adversary/opponent.”

The foreignness to the intervention found in this earthquake is in contrast to the previous earthquake: there were unique stories about and explanations to the previous big earthquake, for instance. But in today's context the issue is more about directly being involved as an aid worker, or a doctor, or a scientist, while the identity of the producer of cultural signs and symbols to address the earthquake has been ignored. The question is: where is the old man/woman to tell us the stories about previous disasters? Where is the platform for the old man/woman who has been a keen observer of this earthquake and the sensations and feelings it produced? This person is needed now, not at a later date when the shock of the earthquake has declined and when a comfortable/romantic remembering is underway. 

The post-earthquake moment could be taken up to deny cultural production with the reasoning that cultural production is associated with “superstition” and “non-scientific knowledge.” And any elaborate and imaginative cultural production, such as a long story, or a figurative image, or a tragic poem, is taken as a sign of emotional trauma and subsequently suppressed or provided with an insipid environment where it can be kept away. Today children are not traumatized the most, but they are most easy to label as traumatized by the earthquake because they most quickly route their experience of trauma into cultural objects, and the many other identities who are also traumatized will only surface later, when these identities are influenced by the children and begin to deal with the trauma with their own cultural production. The earthquake has shown that cultural production is inspired by the work of children, and demanding children to do imitative art based on well established cultural signs and symbols is not properly inspirational to them.

More important than restoring destroyed temples is to allow children to inspire others with their art, and we must be ready to accept a drastic re-imagining of the cultural object on display. However, “superstition” may well be a part of this cultural production, and so we may indeed find a genuine and original (re)-emergence of temples in some form as children build them. We await a commemorative monument made by children, and we await a reaction/response which takes this commemorative monument as the singular influence and inspiration to a very productive, enduring and transnational artistic movement and practice. Nepal has been too isolated, and many foreign gestures cause too much disturbance. We are at risk of perpetuating this isolation if outsiders don't act because they feel intrusive. The gaze of this inactive outside world will translate into productive action when outsiders can see and feel how we are relating to the trauma and thereafter create something for audiences of their own choosing. The disaster is not just “natural” or “domestic,” but even the gesture to help out causes some harm: Nepal cannot be touched without disturbance, there is no neutral or observer position. Artists will enter Nepal next after foreign aid workers and will look to curb the disturbances caused by foreign aid itself.

Monday, May 4, 2015

Rock-Star Scientists in Post-Earthquake Nepal

With the recent earthquake, scientific knowledge in Nepal has been removed from the privileged individuals, institutions and social practices in which it usually operated; the “cultural sphere” where scientific knowledge circulates has shifted from high-brow to lower-mainstream. Indeed, all signs of a connection between science and privileged members of the population is being erased in order not to inspire anger and resentment among the wider public without such access to science. Politicians are playing the role of quiet, uninformed spectators, as if they had not been provided scientific rationales behind the earthquake, both regarding its cause and consequent safety measures (and in order that the “natural disaster” and its casualties is seen to have “natural” causes and not political, social or cultural causes.) Somewhere, a rock-star scientist is conducting the post-earthquake show. 

The rescue mission is in a “quick-relief” and technical-scientific mode: it is in the expensive and sophisticated jet airplanes now flying above, it is in the use of the most cutting edge infra-red cameras, it is in the hands of the more “scientific” (and hence “developed”) foreign rescuers, for whom the goal is to do the work efficiently as much as it is to be successful, and all the while even able Nepalis play the role of the uninformed and helpless. In fact, in the face of this foreign mission, it is because so many of us have to play the role of victims that we continue to stubbornly believe that we will be further victimized by more dangerous earthquakes. But this self-victimization is more so a problem of a sudden diminishing of work and productivity, rather than a traumatic and scared emotional response to the real crisis.

Scientists have organized scientific statements for the more “popular culture” public sphere and consequently scientific knowledge may soon be posted extensively out on the streets, advertised next to the images of consumer products, cementing the authority of science. Scientists have had to orient themselves towards utilization of the popular media, as opposed to the scientific journal, and for the sake of scientific knowledge scientists are to operate directly in the public sphere, exposing themselves to the interrogations of a general public, rather than operating in the gradual and methodical sphere of the seminar/conference. This kind of 'proletarianization' of science has been going on for quite some time, yet the intensity with which scientific knowledge has to be produced for the uninformed masses is especially high today. The scientist's audience is no longer an individual fellow scientist, the audience is a series of demanding but illiterate individuals.

A new bravery and "rock-star" ruggedness among scientists and scientific scholars is evident today, which is certainly to be admired, yet it will eventually lead to too intense a focus on the personalities of the scientists of Nepal and lesser focus on their innovative potential and knowledge production capabilities. In short, doing science in Nepal will be more about acting like a scientist and conforming to an image of a reasonable scientist: the scientist in this post-earthquake stage needs to 'look' the part more than anything else. Each individual scientist is to behave like an authority figure with full confidence on scientific knowledge; science becomes a matter of passion like music to a musician. And science will henceforth have a proper and permanent public face, the problem being that such a face demands a lot of attention.

With the imperative to respond to the trauma of the earthquake, authorities of science in Nepal have had to reckon with themselves with the question regarding their “unity regarding a common viewpoint,” as in, the scientists have to evaluate the complete knowledge and set of beliefs that each scientist has, in order to isolate the deviant scientists that possibly may not conform to the dominant explanation and logic of the cause of the earthquake. A new sensitivity to madness is under construction in wider society: it begins by the stigmatization of trauma in the wider public but its true purpose is to create and isolate the “mad scientist” identity, in order that the deviant scientists are quickly branded to be insane and hence their opinions deemed invalid. It is important to note that all scientists are to agree upon the cause of the earthquake, so that science as a discipline as a whole is legitimized and its circulation in the post-earthquake context allowed by the wider public.

In the later post-earthquake Nepal, a new series of scientists will soon be under development, in order that the legitimacy of science be generated in Nepal through sheer numbers among the total general public population. This “production-line” of scientists is itself quite dangerous, for such questions on the ethics and intellectual potential of the new scientists will be ignored, rather, people will be able to become scientists with relative ease, especially as the scientific knowledge of geology that these new scientists will have to learn and support seems quite simple in its current stage.